New topography dataset released by NASA

This is exciting news – an even more complete topographic map of the earth. This should ultimately make contour lines and elevation data in OpenStreetMap and applications like Ammotin even better!

Here’s a view of Death Valley generated by NASA, created by draping an Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) simulated natural color image over digital topography from the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) data set:

The NASA servers for getting at the data seem a bit overloaded at present, but I look forward to getting my hands on the data!